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Originally Posted by smooth
I've read too many of your posts to genuinely believe that you meant this as literally as it reads to me. [translation: my perception is that you're more intelligent than this statement appears to me].
How can you condense international wars to the death of a "few 'innocent' despotic[...]dictators?" I would have been more comfortable with your standpoint had you argued for preemptive assassinations...but preemptive wars between sovereign nations? I haven't seen the evidence that more harm is reduced by such actions...
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I am not a hawk: don't get me wrong on that point. I am, however, a realist enough to believe that countries are sometimes justified in preemptively attacking each other.
The only legitimate justification for starting a war is self-defense: I do not buy the idea of humanitarian wars. I'm sure you will admit, however, that there are many instances in which self-defense requires preemptive offense. In the example of Iraq, it was certainly not the case that harm was reduced by preemptively going to war, as our intelligence was totally false. Had the scenerio been exactly the same however, with the only difference being that all the intelligence reports were accurate, invading Iraq would have been justified.
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Originally Posted by Elphaba
Politico, you must know that I would challenge you on this statement. You and I can both count the number of preemptive wars that the US has started. It is exactly ONE. How do you propose that we compare it to any previous preemptive war?
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I agree that this is the only modern example of a preemptive war. Especially in light of the fact that the United States has never engaged in a preemptive war without basing its case on massively flawed intelligence, I feel that it is unwise to rule out the possiblity of striking preemptively in the future.
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Originally Posted by willravel
Preemptive war has proven horrible once. How many times does a preemptive strike need to fail before it is considered a poor strategy? This preemptive war was espically terrible because it was based on misinformation and misdirection from the current administration.
Go to war over a threat tto our nation.
Find no threat to our nation.
Claim the war was to liberate the people.
Met with heavy resistence that quickly escalates into a rebelion.
The same Iraqis we came to liberate fight back against us and we capture them and torture them.
America was not in direct danger. We invaded them.
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I completely agree with you: the Iraq war was justified by WMD that didn't exist and then the Bush administration pretended that they had invaded in order to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. If, however, Iraq had actually posed a significant danger to the United States, I would have been ok with the invasion. So yes, Iraq was an illegitimate preemptive war.
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Originally Posted by willravel
When I read posts that are so ofensive that they have to be edited by the moderators, I tend to ignore them. If you want to get your point across, you should just make your point.
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Good advice. I'll do that right now, in fact!